Theater - Côte d'Azur Triangle

About

CÔTE D’AZUR TRIANGLE

By Harry Kondoleon,

At Oddfellows Hall, East Hampton, 1994

Directed by Gaby Rodgers

ABOUT THE PLAY

A woman, her husband and her husband’s lover arrive at the Côte d’Azur airport and over a period of time go up and down the Riviera, only to be disappointed by the Riviera. The dullness and of the Cote d’Azur reveals to these three Americans the dullness and impossibility of love. Soon, they tire of one another and pursue sexual partners, at random. Up and down the Côte d’Azur… until they are attacked and consumed by sea dragons.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Lost Voice of Harry Kondoleon by Charles McNulty

Harry Kondoleon was a playwright constitutionally incapable of playing by the rules. A Dionysian talent dancing in the face of his own extinction, he had the misfortune not only to die from AIDS a few years before the advent of life-extending medications, but also to practice his art in an age when Apollo, with his tight-noosed aesthetic logic, remained king. If fate hadn't been so quick to shortchange Kondoleon, no doubt our theater would have done so eventually. In a world with an inexhaustible appetite for clone drama, it's always the oddball peg that's the problem, never the banal round hole. Kondoleon's death at age 39 left behind an agonizing legacy of what-ifs. What if he'd had the chance to grow into his voice? What if he'd had the time to become more rigorously himself? Fortunately, there's plenty of Kondoleon writing to appreciate, much of it inadequately understood when it first emerged in the late '80s and early '90s. His sui generis offerings were often treated as though they were mere eccentric trinkets. But then it's still hard to accept just how liberated he was from the theatrical past.

About

DIRECTOR

Gabi Rodgers is an American actress, theater director, and journalist. Though she worked extensively as a television actress in the 1950s, she is most remembered for her role as the villainous Lily Carver in the legendary 1955 film noir Kiss me deadly. Her only other theatrical film role was in a gritty 1953 New York indie called The Big Break, starring James Lipton, better known today as the goateed host of cable TV's Inside the Actors Studio. Gaby was also on the cover of the January 1957 issue of Cosmopolitan, representing what the magazine billed as "The New Face of Broadway."